Always Together
by angels cry too
Summary: One push, one crack, and it would all fall apart. A oneshot. Naraku x Kagome


**Always Together  
**

A oneshot.

He was not a normal man.

She slept peacefully, the miko, silently, unaware of her audience. And as he watched, he made love to her with his eyes.

Her hair was soft in the moonlight, as midnight black as his heart. He wanted to run his hands through it.

Her lips were slightly parted, as red as the blood in her body. He wanted so badly to taste it.

Her chest rose and fell in the darkness under her strange green and white kimono. He wanted to strip it off.

As she shifted in her sleep, the hem of its top half moved just a quarter of an inch higher, exposing a slimmer of pale, creamy skin. He shivered in delight.

He wanted to touch her, taste her, beat her and break her and hold her and sing to her his dark lullabies at night. He touched the glass of the mirror with a long, pale finger, tracing the curve of her calves up over her knees and thighs, where he lingered. He moved up, past her stomach and the swell of her breasts, where he shivered, and up the graceful column of her neck to her lips, where he licked his own, and then through her hair and over her brow and down the bridge of her small, sloping nose, where the pink dusted over when she blushed.

He was a twisted man.

ooo

He dreamed of her, sometimes.

In his dreams, she cried out his name. In pain, in agony, in ecstasy and passion and in death.

He licked away her tears, or her modesty, or her happiness, and she cried out his name.

It was a lovely thing, he decided, her voice. Melodic and passionate and furiously, angrily _pure_ all at the same time. When he broke her, he wondered, how would her voice sound?

Like a prayer, he thought silently. Or a bird. Or perhaps a knife. Yes, he said to himself, she would sound like a knife.

She wasn't broken yet, though. She was alive and happy and whole, despite the pieces of her soul that were missing. It was an amazing thing, he had found, her soul. It was so _large_ and _pure_ and _strong_, but so incredibly fragile and delicate at the same time. One push, he thought, one crack, and the whole thing would fall apart. He didn't think she realized just how fragile a thing a soul was, but he did.

He wondered how long it might take for him to crack it. Not long, he decided. Certainly not long at all.

So he waited now, until the right moment, and was content with his dreams.

ooo

He was an abomination.

As he waited in the dark chamber under his castle, he talked to himself. The unspeakably horrific sight of his true form was broken down and taken apart in the darkness, and he listened to himself scream.

He thought of her, through the pain.

She was so much like her predecessor, the one who his mortal self had loved and cherished and lusted after and ultimately killed. Although she was fiery and passionate and maybe even slightly melodramatic at times where the other had been quiet and mature and silently furious at the world, they were still so much alike.

Or perhaps not.

But at the very least, she could follow in her predecessor's footsteps. Her fate was decided the moment she was born, he thought. And as the pieces melded back together and the entities became one once again, he looked over himself and smiled wickedly.

Yes, he said to himself, an abomination.

ooo

He readied himself.

The moment was nearing, the perfect time to take her and break her and love her.

He selected his children, sent them off with a blessing, and waited. She would be coming soon.

Ah, but the little one would have to come first. Such a cute thing, he thought idly. With his furry little tail and blue eyes and russet hair. How utterly, sickeningly adorable. He hated kids. And, oh, here he was now.

He was struggling in the arms of Kagura, who was frowning and cursing and being generally unpleasant to the small boy. He bit her, and Naraku chuckled. Soon, though, he quieted, whimpering only every once in a while. Naraku nodded appreciatively. _Good boy._

She would be here soon, for her kit. He waited in silent anticipation. His blood was running swiftly in his body, and his heartbeat sped up somewhere miles and miles away.

He heard shouts at the door, and readied himself.

ooo

And there she was.

And he was smiling wickedly, cruelly. She cried for her son and cradled him against her chest and Naraku wanted so badly to taste the salt, but remained where he was nevertheless. In the shadows, he watched as they defeated all of his demons and smiled gleefully to himself. _Now was the time._

He stepped out of the shadows.

She looked at him, horrified. She knew she was gone. The moment he stepped out, she knew. They tried so hard, he thought with a certain amount of sadistic satisfaction. They tried so hard, but they didn't win, couldn't win. And she knew she was gone.

They were beaten and bloody and unconscious when he let them go, having Kagura take them on her feather and dump them on the perimeter, much to the wind witch's consternation. Then he looked over at the horrified, desperate girl beside him.

And there she was.

ooo

He kept her close.

Loving her, breaking her, hurting her, making her.

And he was kind to her. She was a fundamentally social creature, he realized, so he had Kagura and Kanna keep her company. Kagura didn't like her much, although certainly she liked her more than she did himself. Kanna was indifferent, mostly silent, but she seemed sometimes to bask in the warmth the girl created. Perhaps, though, it was a simple trick of the light. Naraku didn't much care.

She often watched her friends through Kanna's mirror. It was entirely masochistic of her, he decided as he watched. She cried and traced their figures with her finger and whispered I'm-so-sorry's and I-miss-you's and Please-come-back-to-me's. And they tried, many times, to come back to her, but they could never find her. So they continued to collect shards, somehow, without the aid of the only one who could sense them, and fought and searched for him and desperately, _desperately_, kept up with it, if only to try one last time to save her before he killed them, but he would not be found.

He spoke to her sometimes. Quite interesting conversations they were, he thought. He spoke and she stayed silent. Then he quieted down and she screamed at him and cried and beat her fists against his chest. He tired of it, sometimes, but then there was always the pleasure of seeing her cry and holding her close and hearing her voice.

And he took her, every night. First, she struggled. No, she cried, please, no! But then he did anyway, and she hated him for it. But Naraku had found that hatred and lust were both very much alike, and, in the end, her anger just made the experience even better for the both of them. She looked disgusted with herself, when she first came underneath him as he touched her in the places he had found she reacted the most to. Soon enough, though, she seemed not to care. Her blind anger and self pity and hatred for the world in general were released through the nights, and it became beneficial to both of them.

And he was always around, if not exactly with her. He was always watching, and she knew it.

He always kept her close.

ooo

They made mistakes, sometimes.

She first made the mistake of leaving him. Or rather, trying to leave him.

She had plotted with Kagura, it seemed. Both of their animosity toward him ran deep, and their priorities obviously coincided. Kagura had always been a bad egg, he decided.

That night, he made cruel love to her, holding her neck and whispering terrible things into her ear and slipping unnatural appendages inside of her where other, more normal parts of his anatomy perhaps should not have even been. She didn't try to escape again.

He once made the mistake of comparing her to Kikyo.

Naraku was a man of perfection. Mistakes were certainly not his forte. She had lashed out then, hitting him with all the purification energy she could muster. It would have been a brilliant light show, he thought, if it was not so excruciatingly painful. She had to dig deep inside of her to the reservoirs of energy she didn't even know she contained in order to simply stay alive before finally passing out. Naraku spent several weeks recovering, and realized that he was very lucky indeed that she had not reached her full power yet.

And he supposed they learned from their mistakes, in some ways, but they did make them.

ooo

He read her thoughts.

Sometimes she screamed them at him, then sobbed them, then whispered them brokenly, desperately. Sometimes she cried them out in her sleep, and he listened and stroked her softly, lovingly, and held her until she quieted. Sometimes they didn't even need to be voiced; he could see them in her eyes and her actions and how she behaved when they lay together at night in the cover of darkness.

And perhaps he wasn't a telepath, or a sorcerer, or anything with the type of powers necessary to achieve such feats, but he could always read her thoughts.

ooo

She was not broken yet, though.

This troubled him greatly. It should have been quick and easy. The spark in her eyes should be long gone by now. But it wasn't, and it frustrated him.

He thought long and hard about the best way to do it, and one day he found the perfect solution.

Watch, he told her, and see. He handed her Kanna's mirror as he went out to do an errand, which was an alarm in itself. Naraku rarely left the castle. And so she watched.

She watched as he approached her friends in a small clearing in the woods. Watched as they showered him with insults and threats and Where-is-she's. And she watched as he only chuckled at them and made a deal. If they should live through the encounter, he said, in which case he would certainly be dead, they could have her. And she watched as they agreed, and she screamed and sobbed and cried out to them. No, she said, don't do it! And she watched as they did it anyway, and then she watched as they fell, one by one. And he knew that she had watched, because he could see it in her eyes. The spark was gone, he thought triumphantly, gleefully upon return.

One push, one crack, and it all fell apart.

She was broken.

ooo

He was not a normal man.

He found that she became much like Kikyo after the light died in her eyes. She seemed to dim a little, and walked around rather spiritlessly, taking long naps during the day. He found that he hated it. Kikyo was not what he had wanted.

It troubled him, to walk into a room and see her right in front of him but somehow not there at all. She felt distant, far, far away, and he hated that he could not seem to reach out and touch her anymore.

A normal man perhaps would be happy, ecstatic, even, that he had achieved his goal, but he was not a normal man.

And one day he walked into the room, and then into his death. In his reflection in her empty eyes, Naraku knew that he was as good as dead that day.

She hit him with an amazing blast of pink purification energy, and Naraku wondered at how such a ridiculous color could possibly hurt so much. But he remained standing. Your power, darling miko, seems not to be enough, he told her with a small hint of amusement through the pain. He frowned when her expression didn't change at all. She only walked up to him and knelt down, cupping his face in her palms. He looked into her eyes and she looked back and for a moment time stopped. Then he felt a blinding, horrifying, screaming pain running through his body, and cursed wonderfully.

She had been meditating, he realized belatedly, practicing, preparing. She'd been building up her power and energy and courage for this moment for some time, all when he would not have noticed. She must have tricked him, all those times she had been napping. Naraku thought how wonderful her plan had been, and how ironic that he should die by her hands. But, he said to her, you will be with me. They would die together, be together always. She would forever be his, in his grasp for all of eternity. He shot a tentacle and hit her square in the chest.

No, she shouted, the first sign of life in perhaps months. She would be _free_. Free from his hatred and taint and her own self pity. And then Naraku realized how utterly perfect this was.

He was not who he once was, and she not who she had been, in their past lives, but they both somehow, inexplicably and undeniably, _were_. And he thought that perhaps this was only the proper way to die, perhaps the _best_ way, even, as he pulled her close and held her tight. And she let him.

In their last moments, they held each other close, killing and loving and hating and holding, silently and screaming in pain.

Kagome, he choked.

Naraku, she cried.

And then perhaps he was not a normal man, almost-happily dying in the arms of the woman he had almost-sort-of loved, but, then again, he never really had been.

ooo

**Author's note.**

So, what do you think?

I've been wanting to do a Naraku/Kagome fic for some time now, although I've only ever read about two. It is a very difficult pairing to execute properly, and I hope I did it at least _some_ justice.

At first I had no idea what the storyline might be, and I toiled over it for about an hour. But then I just said, "What the hell," and started typing, and the story sorta wrote itself from there. So if you don't like it, blame...it. Heh.

Review, please! I should like to know if this was not a total waste of memory on my computer. Tell me what you think.

Ja ne!

Hayley


End file.
